[nmrg] EWSN 2024 Sustainability Competition - Call for Competitors

[Xiaolong Zheng <[e-mail]>]

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 EWSN 2024 Sustainability Competition
 (co-located with the EWSN conference – Abu Dhabi, UAE – December 10-13,
2024)
 https://ewsn24.tii.ae/competition.html
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*** CALL FOR COMPETITORS ***
(to display it in a browser or as PDF, visit https://tinyurl.com/mrx8exd3)

The 21st International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks
(EWSN) will host a sustainability competition that aims to quantitatively
benchmark the performance of intermittently-powered embedded systems
against the same baseline. The competition will take place remotely between
June and October 2024 (there will also be an informal testing phase in
April-May), and the winners will be announced and awarded at EWSN in Abu
Dhabi in December 2024.
Competition entries from both academia and industry are encouraged.
Contestants will be tasked to develop a solution that maximizes the number
of tasks executed while a battery-free system based on the MSP430FR5994
device is powered by an intermittent source of energy.

The three top teams will receive generous cash awards sponsored by the
Technology Innovation Institute:
- First place: 6.000 EUR
- Second place: 3.000 EUR
- Third place: 1.500 EUR


*** WHY THIS COMPETITION? ***

Research on battery-free systems has been around for more than a decade,
with plenty of results available on software frameworks, hardware
platforms, and applications (please refer to 'The Internet of Batteryless
Things', CACM, March 2024, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3624718, for a
recent overview of battery-free technologies). However, so far, there has
been no large-scale evaluation of battery-free systems in a common sensing
ecosystem. Therefore, together with you, we want to evaluate different
approaches to designing efficient intermittently-powered sensing systems
against the same baseline. EWSN 2024 will be the first place where such an
evaluation will take place!


*** COMPETITION FORMAT ***

In order to compete, contestants must submit a one-page abstract listing
all team members as well as their affiliations, and describing briefly the
tentative approach/solution that will be followed to tackle the challenge.
Selected teams will be invited to participate in the competition, and at
least one member of each participating team must register and attend the
event in person in Abu Dhabi (December 10–13, 2024). The competition
encompasses the following stages, accompanied by a testing phase, as
detailed next.

- April 15 – May 31, 2024 (Informal testing phase). The E-Cube testbed
facility on which the contestants' code will be run and evaluated is going
to be available for testing to everyone interested in participating in the
event. The testbed is hosted by TU Graz and can be accessed at
https://iti-ecube.tugraz.at/, where also detailed tutorials about its use
as well as the structure of the expected firmware will be available and
updated continuously. We strongly recommend prospective participants to get
familiar with the testbed facility early on and to get in touch with us!

- June 1, 2024 (Competition entry deadline). After the informal testing
phase, the teams that plan to participate in the event are expected to send
a one-page abstract (listing all team members as well as their affiliations
and describing briefly the tentative approach/solution that will be
followed to tackle the challenge) via e-mail to all competition organizers
listed below. Please use as subject: 'EWSN 2024 Sustainability Competition:
Submission'.

- June 8, 2024 (Notification of accepted teams). Selected teams will be
notified and invited to participate in the competition. At least one member
of each participating team is expected to register and attend the event in
person. Travel and lodging expenses are the responsibility of each team,
but please note that several grants for female researchers and students
will be available to cover their accommodation and/or conference
registration costs (see https://ewsn24.tii.ae/grants.html).

- June 15 – October 15, 2024 (Remote competition). During this phase, each
team will develop and run its solutions on the E-Cube testbed facility,
which will be accessible to all participating team members throughout the
competition. Please note that each team will be assigned a unique ID (e.g.,
'Team-04') in E-Cube to ensure the anonymity of results, as the performance
of the various teams will be visible on a public leaderboard (knowledge of
each other's performance is one of the salient aspects of the competition).
Participants and their affiliations will be published on the competition
webpage, but the mapping to team IDs will not be disclosed: only the
identity of the top-performing teams will be revealed at EWSN 2024. Hence,
we expect that contestants will abstain from publicly announcing their team
ID via social media or other means.

- October 15, 2024 (Submission of final firmware and competition abstract).
All teams must submit their final firmware (only a .hex file is needed, no
source code needs to be delivered) for evaluation, together with a two-page
abstract summarizing their contribution to the competition. The competition
abstracts will follow the same requirements as poster and demo abstracts
and should be submitted via HotCRP together with the final firmware (a link
will be provided at a later stage). Accepted competition abstracts will be
part of the EWSN conference proceedings and appear in the ACM digital
library unless teams explicitly mark their submission as confidential.

- October 16 – December 9, 2024 (Evaluation of the final firmware). During
this phase, all submitted firmware will be run on E-Cube by the competition
organizers, using the same set of energy-availability traces that were
provided throughout the remote competition phase, as well as new traces
which were previously not available. Each team will score points based on
the number of challenges solved via a proof-of-work algorithm (see
Competition objectives and evaluation procedure section below).

- December 10–13, 2024 (EWSN 2024 Conference in Abu Dhabi). During the EWSN
2024 conference, all competing teams must present their solution at a
dedicated poster session, during which they will have the possibility to
engage in lively discussions with the other conference attendees. The
winners of the competition will be announced and awarded during a plenary
session and will be expected to present their solution as a 'lightning
talk'. Details about the lightning talks and poster formats will be
provided at a later stage.


*** COMPETITION OBJECTIVES AND EVALUATION PROCEDURE

The winning team will be the one maximizing the number of challenges solved
over a predefined time window, during which the competition organizers will
emulate varying degrees of available energy. To solve a challenge,
contestants have to utilize hashcash, a SHA1-based proof-of-work algorithm
for which a reference implementation is provided by the organizers.

For example, using a challenge ‘EWSN2024‘ and a difficulty of 16-bit, we
first create a starting string with a well-known format, e.g.,
1:16:240403:EWSN2024::WXhnFeDleN:1. The segments of the string separated by
a colon are: version (always 1), bits (16 as per difficulty), date (6
digits, fixed for the competition), resource (the challenge word given),
extension (empty), random (a user-chosen random string), and a counter. We
now need to check if this string’s SHA1 hash has 16 (as per the chosen
difficulty) leading zeros (most significant bits). Our string (with the
counter of 1) has a SHA1 hash of 20db26cb6b1e17a2079fc3daf05fd01a7ed08cb5,
which only has two leading zeros. Thus, we increment the counter to 2 and
hash the updated string and keep incrementing the counter until we find a
string that has a hash with the required leading zeros. In this example,
after 96620 attempts, the string with counter 96620
1:16:240403:EWSN2024::WXhnFeDleN:96620 has a hash of
0000babe195c81d00ecec4cd8f0dc1572ebd46d4 with 16 leading zeros (0x0000) as
required. The string 1:16:240403:EWSN2024::WXhnFeDleN:96620 is hence the
solution to the challenge.

At the start of an experiment, an external I2C FRAM memory will contain a
list of challenges similar to the above example, to which contestants need
to supply a solution despite the intermittent energy supply. At the end of
an experiment, the computed solutions are automatically collected by
E-Cube, the number of correct solutions is tallied against any incorrect
solutions, and points awarded accordingly. Additional technical details, a
reference solution, as well as the evaluation procedure will be posted on
the competition’s website.


*** ELIGIBILITY ***

Both academia and industry submissions are encouraged. Please note that
there is no limit to the number of participating teams from a single
organization and the number of members in each team. Teams can be diverse
in terms of age, experience, gender, and academic/industrial background.
There is also no requirement on the originality of the competing solutions:
the demonstration of good use of well-known or previously-published
intermittent-computing/battery-free solutions is strongly encouraged. No
source code needs to be submitted as part of this competition (the
submission of a .hex file is sufficient), but we encourage contestants to
do so, if possible, in the spirit of open and collaborative research. There
is also no restriction on the operating system, or codebase used to program
the devices.


*** DISCLAIMER ***

The EWSN 2024 sustainability competition will take place if at least six
teams respond to this preliminary call.


*** IMPORTANT DATES ***

- Informal testing phase: April 15 – May 31, 2024
- Competition entry deadline: June 1, 2024 (11:59 PM AoE)
- Notification of accepted teams: June 8, 2024
- Remote competition: June 15 – October 15, 2024
- Submission of final firmware and competition abstract: October 15, 2024
(11:59 PM AoE)
- EWSN 2024 conference: December 10–13, 2024
-- Poster presentations from each competing team: December 11, 2024
-- Plenary session with award ceremony and lightning talks: December 12,
2024


*** COMPETITION ORGANIZERS ***

- Nivedita Arora, Northwestern University, USA
- Przemysław Pawełczak, TU Delft, The Netherlands
- Markus Schuß, TU Graz, Austria


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 Our sincere apologies if you receive multiple copies of the call
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-- 

Sincerely,

Xiaolong Zheng

Associate Professor

School of Computer Science

Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Beijing, P. R. China

https://xiaolongbupt.github.io/